What if you could use the entire surface of your handset as a touchscreen? Nokia’s GEM concept presents such a scenario. The front, back, and sides of the phone all become surfaces that you can interact with. The phone’s surface adapts to the function. As Senior Design Manager Jarkko Saunamäki, who led the team which invented GEM, explains: “Now, when you launch an application like the camera, your mobile phone still looks like a mobile phone, but with GEM, when you launch the camera application, the whole phone looks like a camera.” The video below shows the concept in action:
With no physical buttons, gestures (like a circle to launch the camera) call up applications which can each have their own interface. The whole phone also becomes your display. For example, you could have a single image like a map wrap around the phone or one side could show a zoomed in view of the same map.
The device is called GEM because “polished precious stones have several sides. Also it’s a concept which is like a raw gem, but it needs to be polished to become a real product.”
Between this and flexible phones, it looks like there will be some exciting devices in the future.